Biography

A self-taught painter, Claramunt started to make a name for himself in Barcelona in the early 1970s. Regarded as a key figure in contemporary Spanish painting, he is known for a practice strongly associated with the cities in which he lived and painted: Barcelona, Seville, Madrid, Marrakesh and Bilbao.

The themes and locations of his work are tirelessly embodied in a vast oeuvre including paintings, drawings and self-published books: an imagery that travels a highly personal itinerary whilst also demonstrating the evolution of painting in Spain from the 1970s until the late 1990s. Without distinguishing between figuration and abstraction because, as he once said, ‘a brush stroke can be anything,’ he was committed to a certain way of looking at the real.

For Claramunt, painting was always a form of permanence, regardless of the settings or themes depicted: from the first series, showing urban scenes and train stations, to his final works, dominated by the sea, not forgetting his figures and characters of Marrakesh and other compositions in a much more abstract vein. And while, during his career, he was occasionally associated with certain trends of the day in European expressionism, his prosaic vision and non-symbolic approach, his materiality and his concept of the real, made him an inimitable figure.

With his entirely independent attitude, working out of step and from the sidelines, he nevertheless had a great historical awareness as a painter, reflecting lucidly on the meaning of his work in relation to the history that preceded it. For that reason, his language, deeply rooted in painting tradition, constitutes an essential model of our recent culture.